You hear this every day, if you listen long enough: The same stories, with almost, or nearly almost the exact same wording every newscast. This is a quick way to not stand out at all.

One of radio’s greatest pioneers, Gordon McLendon, even though he primarily did Top 40 (which he and Kansas City’s Todd Storz INVENTED), was known for hiring and training incredibly talented News staffs.  I had the great pleasure of working with two of them, at KNUS in Dallas (which helped change the landscape of FM radio in the early seventies) and KILT, longtime Top 40 giant in Houston.

Both news staffs were incredible – chock full of amazing writers with riveting deliveries, every bit as much “personalities” as the disc jockeys were.  And each of them learned on Day One the McLendon Rule: Rewrite every story for every newscast.

Yes, the basic facts were the same.  But the entries INTO stories that repeated were always just a little different, and what was left out of one newscast would be in another one, so rather than dull repetition, those tiny differences made the listener’s brain receive it as NEW information.

This principle was later documented in a study at Cal Tech, where they found that just repeating something led to boredom, but even the slightest changes fired new synapses in the brain.  Gordon McLendon had no such research.  He simply felt it was the right thing to do.

This is largely an overlooked area of radio news segments, but when you do it, you lift yourself above all your competition.  And it’s easy, requiring minimal effort.

Have you listened to your news lately?  Maybe a better question is “Has your audience paid any attention to it?”